It is ok to feel that way completely. In these last few days I have been doing a lot of thinking. You may or may not know my W actually did a DB phone session with me today. Yeah sounds great. She spend the entire hour doing her version or a celebrity roast. I was the main attraction. I tell you this because as I think about how positive of thing this is supposed to be reality kind of creeps up and tells me not so fast.
Fact: 1. She has a new life in OK 2. Any 180 I do will go unnoticed 3. The casual coffee house date or the reconnection phase is and will remain absent in my case. 4. She has a support system that I know is cheering her on for being so strong. (My family has remained mute on the point on my request. This needed to be about me not about everyone telling me how to feel or when to move on.)
This are all huge mountains to climb but you know what, every day I become more and more comfortable with the idea. Because throughout this process I am learning more about myself. At first I had guilt and felt terrible, go back to my first thread and read, you will see a broken man who rattled so much information on his first post it was hard even for me to follow.
I think I am starting to learn the difference between hope and detachment, don't know that I am there yet but if it feels like what I am feeling right now then I am starting to get it.
Do I hope my W and get back together and rebuild my family? Yes.
Do I want to correct the wrongs I did to her? Yes.
Do I love her? Yes.
Have I suffered? You bet!
But then I ask myself these other questions....
Do I need her to come back? No.
If she does not give me the chance to correct the wrongs I have done can I go forward? Absolutely! It will be her lost. Not mine.
Do I still love her? Yes. Probably always will but my happiness will not be determined by her love for me. Unconditional love is very different than the love these WAS claimed to have had for us. Unconditional love is what we have for them. That means letting her go and being happy for her success as you celebrate your own.
Do I still suffer? Everyday a little less.
So what does this mean to me? If she comes back will I accept her? Depends....what does she offer to the M at this point? Can she enrich my life the way I think I can hers. What has she learned? How has she grown?
Next......
I know how you feel. Some days are better than others. We often comment on each other’s threads and say sounds like my W or sounds like my H. In the end we are all very similar and our cases are mostly alike. Take out one piece here and one piece there. Prepare yourself because when people tell you all you can do is take care of yourself, well, there is a lot of meaning to those words.
Yeah, I have been following your posts close because it seems the most like my sitch. (without the daughter or mother part) I wanted to reply after you posted your conversation but I really couldn't think of anything to ad. It's brutal but I think that them venting is a huge part of the process. The fact that your wife was willing to do that gives me a lot of hope lol.
I know that my wife is running full speed towards the divorce. I know that she is putting a ton of her regrets on my shoulders and hoping that when I am gone she won't feel that pain any more. Of course I am stuck hoping the worst for her... that when I am gone she sees that I wasn't the source of her discontent and that I can be an asset to her and not a burden. I think that when we go to sign the papers I will just say to her "I told you that there was nothing that I wouldn't do for you" and sign... let her know that I meant every word. When I tell her I want her to be happy, I mean it and when I tell her that I want to understand how I made that not happen, I meant that too...
I am in a weird spot because I'm really trying to GAL and that might mean taking a job 500 miles from home. The move to Houston would be huge for me personally and I think it is ultimately the best thing for me to do... especially if I am going to end up single but I don't want to do anything that hurts my chances for reconciliation. At the same time, staying home and playing poker while unemployed could be the worst thing I could do to make my self attractive to my wife. I'm torn.
I got called from a local staffing company about a very good job here that I am being considered for... if I could get that job it would be the best case scenario for everything but the chances of me having to move are still very high.
We'll see what fate has in store for me. I hope that it gives me the opportunity to show my wife all that I have learned and will allow me the chance to show her what unconditional love really is. I'm so afraid that I missed my chances and that she has truly moved on but her actions throughout our separation give me hope.
In the meantime I'm going to DB the best that I can. The legal divorce will happen but my chances of living out the end of my life with my wife are not gone.
I'm going to go against the grain here and say that IMO, you've been approaching this all wrong.
You've done the going dark thing and it hasn't produced any positive results. In fact you haven't "gone dark". You're just afraid to talk to her. Going dark is a conscience thing and you're just waiting in the hope that she'll notice you. Wrong way to approach it.
You haven't really talked to her in a couple of months and personally to her it might have shown that you've "given up". I'm not saying you need to fall to pieces after her, you just need to START SOMETHING.
What's the sense of going dark if she doesn't see any of the changes you're making. From her perspective, it almost seems like you want the D.
You keep having an attitude like, oh well the D is going to happen so it doesn't matter what I do. BS. There are alot you can do. You're just too afraid to do it. If you don't show that you value your M, why should your W?
I still say you should just call her to say 'hello'. Have you ever thought that the reason why she was taking awhile to get things sorted out was because she was waiting for you to make a move? I could be wrong, but you'll never know unless you try communicating with her.
M-43 W-40 2D - 9 and 5
Emotion, yet peace. Ignorance, yet knowledge. Passion, yet serenity. Chaos, yet harmony. Death, yet a new life.
Well, that's why I said something to that effect in the email I sent her towards the end of December. That's when she responded by saying that she was in no way doing that and that she just had a crappy lawyer and that she just wanted the divorce to be final so that we could move on. That was when I called her and did everything wrong. After the call she texted me and said that she didn't want to talk to me if I was just going to accuse her of stuff. I replied that I understood and that night I emailed her the last really long email that I have sent her. So, in effect I have only been dark since then (right before Christmas)
Trust me, I would like to call her but I just feel like anything that I do right now is going to make her feel like I'm getting between her and her goal of being free. She thinks that that is what the divorce will do for her but I believe that after the divorce happens she will wake up and still feel like crap. Most of our issue is related to her MLC I think and she is blaming me for all of the regrets she has in life.
It does really stress me out that I have changed so much and she can't see it but she wouldn't even have lunch with my sister... she doesn't want to connect with anything that has anything do with me right now. She doesn't talk to any of our friends and I feel like the only thing that I can do is let her experience this and see what is on the other side of it. I would like to try to reach out to her but as you can see, even my trimmed down email was judged to be too much by the DB'ers here. I don't know if what I'm doing is right or wrong but I'm trying to give her what she asked for.
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M 11/11/00 Bomb end of September 2010 Filed 11/9/10
"Trust me, I would like to call her but I just feel like anything that I do right now is going to make her feel like I'm getting between her and her goal of being free."
Mindreading. And stop contradicting me.
"It does really stress me out that I have changed so much and she can't see it"
That's why you needed to call her. You wouldn't so why are you stressing? It was your choice.
"Anybody else have thoughts? I would really like to have an excuse to contact her "
She's your W. That should be excuse enough. Ask how she is even though she texted you about it.
IMO, if you don't do this within the next week. You WILL be D and you will not see her again. Put it to you this way, if you call her and she doesn't like it, what's she going to do D you? Oops already happening.
Psych yourself up first so that you don't break down. Keep it light and friendly.
M-43 W-40 2D - 9 and 5
Emotion, yet peace. Ignorance, yet knowledge. Passion, yet serenity. Chaos, yet harmony. Death, yet a new life.
But what about all of the advice that says that the legal divorce is nothing? I'm not sure how she can believe me when I tell her that I have changed for the better if I am going back on my word of letting her go through with the process if she decides that that is what she wants.
So, I could pretty much have the same conversation that I was having when I wrote the email (that I skimmed down into the one line response) and that is ok?
I'm not afraid of the legal divorce. I don't see that as a line in the sand but you seem to. What I don't want to do is push her away more. I'm not reading her mind, I'm reading what she has said and how she has acted. That is all that I have to go off of (along with the advice of this board and resources that I have read) But everyone else points me in the direction of less is more. Of course I want to initiate contact...
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M 11/11/00 Bomb end of September 2010 Filed 11/9/10
